By Samantha Wheeler

Lockdown hasn’t stopped Newhaven College students advocating for compulsory empathy training surrounding sensitive issues for Victorian Police, at the YMCA Victoria Youth Parliament.

Victorian Police deal with an extensive range of issues such as domestic violence, sexual assault, health crimes and hate crimes. 

The students said their research found in these sensitive situations, there had been mishandling or inappropriate responses by the Victorian Police.

The Newhaven College team wrote a Bill to establish the Sensitive Issues Training of Police (SITOP).

This will implement training for police by addressing the “problem through education, aiming to elicit empathy and understanding from police officers, leading to appropriate management of sensitive issues they encounter”.

The students, Anna Scott (18), Laura Vivian (17), Nick Thomas (17), Ella Beasley (17) and Coco Hosken (16), said they created the Bill in the hope it would create “a safer environment, particularly, for people protesting, because it is one of our rights to be able to protest”.

“A lot of incidents with police where they've acted negatively have been around protests,” Anna said.

“There’s a lot of sensitivity, because people are protesting about what they care about. And they need to feel like they can do that freely.”

The students believe with the rise of ACAB and the Black Lives Matter movement there seems to be a growth in distrust of police.

“Especially for youth,” Laura said.

“We have a negative image towards police enforcement; I think that the older generation, not so much.”

She believes this is due to young people having higher exposure to social media.

“Although we're only seeing snippets within these videos that are shared online, we still think the intent behind them is wrong,” Laura said.

“To stop it happening further, we wanted to enforce this training.”

A SMS survey conducted by Roy Morgan Research Institute found older Victorians have a more positive view of the Victorian Police than their younger counterparts.

Fifty-four per cent of those aged 50-64 years, 45 per cent of 35-49 years, and people aged 65+ rating police either ‘very high’ or ‘high’ compared to only 31 per cent for those aged under 35.

While the students don’t believe all police officers fit the description of what has been shown on social media, they’ve observed an “absence of trust and respect” for police within the younger age groups.

“As young people we should be able to wholeheartedly trust (police) as their role is to protect us,” Laura said.

The students hope this Bill will benefit Victorian society as a whole, especially victims of “family violence, racialised hate crimes, mental health crises and sexual assault”.

Nick Thomas believes it will also benefit Victoria Police, helping them receive extra training and “making sure they get a better image in the media, and don't get this sort of backlash constantly”.

The students successfully passed this Bill through the YMCA Victorian Youth Parliament and it was handed to Minister for Youth, Ros Spence with 17 other Bills at the closing ceremony on September 23.